


siúil, a rún: every tear

by Kells



Series: siúil, a rún: the Cold War AAU [1]
Category: Captain America - All Media Types, The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types, Winter Soldier (Comics)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Cold War, F/M, Female Steve Rogers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-12
Updated: 2015-07-18
Packaged: 2018-02-20 21:45:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 6,131
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2444285
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kells/pseuds/Kells
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Winter Soldier, Cold War style: the part where they wake up on their own on either side of the iron curtain</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. prologue: Kemerovo

Everyone in the hospital calls him Yakov. He tries to say that’s not his name, but they act like they don’t understand him. The doctors shake their heads and look sympathetic, but then smile as if to say they’ll get there in the end. He’d tell them he doesn’t know where they’re supposed to be going, but no one’s listening to him. There are tonics and wires and needles and he needs to see her and everything hurts.

After too many days of people speaking their nonsense sounds at him he begins to repeat them- they obviously want him to. Slowly, slowly, it congeals into a language they tell him he always knew. He doesn’t think he did, but when a nurse- young, kind, faintly scared- asks Yasha if he’d like some water he just nods, nods, and thanks her in cautious syllables that make her smile. It is good, at least, to be able to speak again. When he has the strength and the confidence to do it he asks for his sweet girl, whom he has missed every waking second and some when he was asleep. The big man, the general, is the one with the answers. Alexei, who comes and goes as if he owns the place. Of all these people, Alexei is the one who listens when he tries to talk.

“Please, I need to see my Ste-“

His head begins to throb. He breaks off, tries again. “My wife.”

“Stefaniya,” the general says softly. It sounds very nearly right.

“Yes. I need to see her. Please.”

He already knows it cannot be good news. If she had the power to move or speak she would have been in the room before he woke. If she doesn’t, though- if she woke up like he did and they need him to help her remember- but then Alexei shakes his head, so sad. Yasha closes his eyes and thinks it wouldn’t be the worst thing if he never opened them again. He does, though, and it isn’t a surprise. He realised long ago that there would come a day when he had to wake without her.

Alexei smiles. It’s a quiet smile, reassuring.

“We’ll look after you, Yashka. It’s the least we can do after what you and your wife have done for us.”

He doesn’t really remember what that is, exactly, but Yasha nods, nods, and thinks he’s glad he won’t have to be entirely alone.

He asks what will happen to him after this. He’s always wanted to know, and been afraid of finding out.

Alexei says the choice is his; he has some ideas, if Yasha wants to hear them.

“I can’t stay here,” Yasha whispers, meaning the place where he grew up. It would be full of her, and he would lose his mind. He might still lose it, somewhere else, but at least there it would be less to the ghosts of her and more because he is cold and weak and lost without his bright love to light the days and warm the nights. “I’ll go anywhere, as long as it’s nothing like home.”

Alexei looks like he was expecting this. Maybe he was. He is often the only one who knows how things are done, and the only one who listens like he understands.

“I think you might enjoy Moscow. Our capital is kind to people looking to leave the past behind.”

Yasha nods, nods, because he has already realised Alexei likes it when people agree with him. The truth is that he isn’t looking to leave the past behind, though, not really. He’d much rather have been left behind with it. But they’ve never been to Moscow, at least, so- she’ll never go to Moscow. She’ll never go anywhere, now. Oh, god.

He stops nodding.

The general gets ready to leave.

“You must rest. We will speak again, Captain.”

Captain sounds right. It almost makes Yasha’s head hurts less.

“Thank you,” he says softly. Alexei claps his shoulder encouragingly as he stands. It’s the first time someone has touched the captain in friendship since he woke, and it makes Yasha smile.

Alexei seems pleased. He says, again, that he will take care of things.

Yasha nods, nods, and closes his eyes. If he is lucky, he will see her in his dreams. It’s frightening, much more than discovering that with a blow to the head he could forget a language everyone seems sure he grew up speaking, to know as truth that no matter what anyone does he will begin to forget her face.

“I love you,” Yasha tells her in case she can still hear him. That much he will remember even if it kills him.

The nurse in the room- there’s always someone in the room- pats his hand, still very kind, but now also sad. 

He’ll go to Moscow for her, to see if she would like it. He should have some stories to tell her when they meet again; she’ll want to know everything about the days that should have been hers too.

"Steph," he murmurs as his eyes grow heavy with something worse than sleep. He has known since they were children that she was his, and only his, but not to keep. 


	2. prologue, New York

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Stephanie, knowing things don't make sense but not up to making sense of things.

“No,” Stephanie Barnes protested, close to pleading. “You’re wrong. How can he- if I-”

Her bloodshot eyes fixed on the almost-familiar figure who had so far kept mostly to the edges of the room. Anthony Stark was the living image of his father from the clothes he wore to the way he talked; Stephanie watched him watching her with Howard’s scared compassion in his dark eyes while the other guy- Nick Fury- offered her impossible details about the ice, and Russian submarines, and how it could be even vaguely possible that they had found her in the wreck of that terrible ship but without any trace of Captain Barnes.

If Howard had been there, Stephanie thought wildly, their engineer would have built her a time machine by now, or at the very least found the hidden compartment where her stupid husband must be hiding. Howard would never, ever, have looked her in the eye and asked her to try to live with her husband’s sacrifice.

“Tony, please.”

She knew the answer, though, from the defeated line of his shoulders and the way the men with guns, who had come in prepared to subdue her when she’d asked where the hell she was, couldn’t seem to look anywhere except at their own feet. She knew the answer from the fact that her husband, who adored her, and who had gone down swearing blind that he’d be there if he could, was nowhere to be seen.

“I’m so sorry, Stevie.”

Stephanie blinked.

“Did you call me ‘Stevie’?”

Everyone who wasn’t already motionless with awkward, vicarious grief froze. Tony looked like he wanted to swallow his own tongue.

“I’m sorry. Is that- he didn’t- I’m sorry.”

Something like a smile, pale and brittle, stole across her face.

“It was your dad called me Stevie, towards the end. My- he-”

_“I wish he’d stop calling you that," Bucky muttered mulishly as he shrugged off his leather jacket and folded it with the careful attention of someone who’d never learnt to take nice things for granted._ _“Don’t they know anything in Long Island? Stevie’s a boy’s name.”_

_Steph laughed, combing her fingers through his hair as soon as she’d stashed her gloves in a drawer._

_“You call me Steve sometimes. Your hair’s getting long again.”_

_“Is that a good thing or are you gonna fix it? I call **boy** -you Steve. I’ll call **him** Stevie if you really want. **You’re** Stephanie, and Steph, and Maire. And a chroí, and a ghrá geal, and sweetheart, and my honey- _

_“And your beloved,” Steph reminded him quietly._ _“You called me that when you had to leave.”_

_“So I did,” Bucky murmured, grinning at her as he started on the buttons of his wife’s double-breasted coat since Steph herself was making no move to get undressed._ _“Didn’t you like it better than ‘Stevie’?”_

_Steph’s hands found her husband’s belt._

_“I don’t want **Howard Stark** calling me ‘beloved’, do I?” _

_“Guess not,” Bucky murmured, already focused on her lips._ _“It’s still a boy’s name, though,‘s all I’m saying.”_

_“Leave it,” Steph ordered, and he did. Mostly, she knew, because she made sure her husband had something more worthwhile to work on instead, also on the theme of how thoroughly she was not a boy._

“You’re fine,” she assured their friend’s cringing son. “I think he’d have called me Howard before he called me Stevie.”

Tony smiled, relief apparently making him braver than he had been so far, and crossed the room to take her hand in his.

“Anything you need,” he said, insistent. “Anything at all, you just say the word.”

I need my husband back, Stephanie wouldn’t waste anyone's time saying out loud.

“I need to get out of this prison cell,” she growled. The boss-man in the leather trench coat looked affronted; Fury had explained twice or three times that Stephanie wasn’t being detained. She wasn’t really looking to split hairs, though, and a tiny room with a door that locked from outside and had armed guards around it seemed to her to speak for itself. Tony smiled- not his father’s smile, at least. His own hopeful, too-enthusiastic smile.

“We can do that. As soon as you’re ready, sweetheart.”

She flinched, just a little, but didn’t say he couldn’t call her that. If anyone ever tried to call her ‘a ghrá geal,’ she decided, she’d get them right between the eyes.

“Did you say 1986?”

Tony nodded cautiously. Forty years and more. Some of her friends might still be alive, just about. She could go see Angie Farleigh for him, maybe. He’d want that, wouldn’t he? Later, maybe, when she could say his name out loud.  When she wouldn’t have to wonder how it could be worth it that some sweet girl had grown up without her father to get his captain two more years, and nothing further.

“Okay,” she said, because she had grown up in the Depression, married her sweetheart even though none of her doctors had really ever expected her to live past her twenty-fifth birthday, and then fought a war with her shield-bearing captain and his rag-tag crew. If there was one thing Stephanie Barnes knew well it was how to square with what she couldn’t change and get on with getting on. “1986.”

Tony- Anthony James Stark, living legacy of the friendship that had made it possible for Stephanie to find herself alone in the future, and eventually she’d have to work on not blaming anyone for _that_ \- was still holding her hand. Stephanie squeezed it once, and then let go.

“I guess you’d better show me the future then, huh.”


	3. Brooklyn, late afternoon

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tony delivers a message in a bottle, kind of, and Bucky says too much and and not enough and everything Steph needs to hear.

“I brought you a present,” Tony announced, brandishing a video casette by way of greeting. “But it’s not from me, so I won't be offended if you hold your applause until you’ve had a look.”

Steph made no move either to take the tape or to applaud.

“Is your Nick Fury still trying to get me ‘back out in the world’?”

Tony winced- he knew full well that SHIELD’s attempts to bring her up to speed with the latter part of the 20th Century had been clumsy at best. Fury’s personal overtures had been by far the worst- their last meeting had ended with Stephanie, already in tears, using her gun to make Fury _just stop talking_. After that display, Howard's boy had gone full-on Scion of the House of Stark on SHIELD, threatening everything from legal action to corporate sabotage until Fury promised to back the hell off.

“C’mon, would I do that to you? I promise you want to see this, Stevie.”

He wouldn't and she knew it, so Steph leaned forward in time to gasp when Tony popped the case. Steph took another hesitant step towards him and ran a single finger reverently over the name scrawled across the label in Howard's generous, looping script.

“We had to convert the reels,” Tony muttered. The younger Mr. Stark, Steph had already noticed, was as averse to silence as his father had been before him. “I don’t know what’s on it- he never let anyone near it.”

Stephanie closed her eyes, fighting tears for what felt like the thousandth time since they'd said her boy was dead and gone. She seriously considered telling Tony to take the damn thing away and come back in a couple of years, but then jerked her chin in her best effort at a decisive nod.

“Let’s see it, then.”

Tony nodded gamely, heading to the ‘home entertainment system’ he’d set up just for her. Steph hadn’t made any effort to figure out how it worked, but she was paying attention now. Her eyes were already on the television when her husband’s image filled the screen. Stephanie drew in a sharp, pained breath, desperate to touch but acutely aware that pressing her palm to a television screen wouldn’t help, at all, with anything. Tony’s eyes were huge with sympathy, but his father spoke from behind the camera before he or Steph could say anything.

“Trust me, ace. One day she’ll thank you.”

Bucky’s lips quirked in one of his driest expressions.

“I’m pretty sure that’s not how it works, a chara.”

“She’ll thank  _me,_  then. Jeez, you can be a smartass when it suits you. She’ll be glad you did it, all right?”

Steph nodded, irrationally desperate to show her support, but Bucky didn’t look like he believed them.

“If she throws the reel at your head for making her deal with this I want you to put it back together and watch this bit over so you can see for yourself that I told you so, okay?”

“All right, already. Will you talk to your girl now?”

The captain glowered.

“That’s a metal box. My girl is with your Peggy Carter. They’re probably making Gordon wish he’d just stayed in London, which if you ask me is a lot more fun than talking about this.”

Tony, probably imagining his father's exasperated glare, gave a bark of laughter that sounded largely involuntary. Bucky, who didn’t have to imagine it, was already smirking.

“I take it the guys in engineering don’t talk back this much.”

“The guys in engineering know I’m always right,” Howard retorted, and Bucky grinned into the camera as he relaxed.

“Hey, my Steph.”

Separated from her husband by too many years and an unknown, unthinkable number of nautical miles, his Steph dropped silently to her knees so that she was on a level with him. Her eyes were aching already; swiping at her cheek confirmed that she’d been crying probably since the first time she heard his voice. Tony rested a tentative hand on Steph’s shoulder, awkward but earnest just like his dad, and risked a tiny smile when Steph chose not to jerk away. Way too far away, Bucky went on in the same gentle, faintly uncertain voice.

“This jerk’s makin’ me do this because he’s a morbid bastard, but I guess I’d be glad to see you again, huh. And he’s always right, apparently, so-”

“You’ll see,” Howard promised; Bucky glared without heat.

“Shut the hell up, big man- I’m talking to your metal box here.”

Both men laughed, but Bucky sobered quickly as he returned his attention to the camera. Stephanie, suddenly aware that she’d been holding her breath, exhaled with force just as her husband spoke.

“I know how quickly things go all to hell around here, so I’m just gonna say it, alright? I’m so sorry, Stephanie. God knows I never meant to leave you on your own.”

She shook her head, desperate to deny it; her husband’s voice took on the quiet compassion of someone who knew he was asking the impossible but felt he had to do it anyway.

“You gotta know it’s not your fault, okay? No matter how it goes, a chroi. And unless we did something godawful right at the end there’s nothing I’da done different anyway. Long as you’re safe, and if you can be happy, then I’ve already got everything I wanted from this life.”

Stephanie gave a tiny, miserable gasp of protest; in front of her, Bucky dragged his right hand roughly through his hair in a life-long gesture of agitation.

"I know, I know, you’ll never be happy again. I’m gonna ask you to try anyway, okay?”

He grinned unexpectedly, and it wasn’t his soft, sad smile from earlier but the kind of boisterous grin that usually accompanied some only-barely-legal escapade with Jack and Gary.

"I figure you’re not gonna miss me anyway, so you'll be just fine when I’m out of the picture.”

“Stupid boy,” Steph breathed, at a loss to guess where he thought he was going with this. Onscreen, Bucky’s megawatt smile dimmed into something much more private.

"No, listen. Ta mo chroí istigh ionat; I know you know that. So you  _can’t_ miss me, see, cos I’ll be right there. You take me with you where you go, right, and when you make it home I’ll show you I’ve been here the whole time. You’re gonna be just fine, Steph, okay?”

She shook her head, because she wasn’t, but of course he kept on going.

“I love you, you know. So much it makes me talk to metal boxes shining lights right into my face just so you’ll remember that I’ll never go two seconds without thanking God for every day I have with you.”

The hopeless boy was starting to choke up himself, just thinking about it. Bucky took a breath, visibly pulling himself together, and offered the camera another little grin.

“You hang in there, my brave girl, all right? I’ll see you as soon as I can.”

There was a moment of silence, in Brooklyn Heights as much as in Howard’s wartime lab, then Bucky glanced away with a self-conscious frown.

"I feel like an ass talking to this thing. Is that what you meant, even? Should I start over?"

“Don’t you think the thought,” Howard cried, already reaching for hyperbole to cover the catch in his own voice. “That was perfect. Fucking poetry, your friend Ralston would say. Charming in the extreme. If you weren’t already married to a lovely girl I’d propose right now.”

The image froze like that, the captain’s head thrown back in startled laughter, his eyes shining with affection.

“Bucky,” Stephanie whispered- it was probably the first time she’d said his name aloud since they’d told her he wasn’t ever coming home. “My James, god-”

She cut herself off with a deep, not really calming breath, and gave Tony the same kind of brittle smile with which she’d met him at the door.

“Thank you,” she murmured. Because Tony Stark was a good kid, he started babbling about meetings he wasn’t allowed to miss before Steph had to figure out how to ask him to get lost so she could lose her mind in peace. “Can I hang onto this, you think?”

He all but swore that the tape was hers and always had been, then put his arms around her in what could have been the most awkward hug in human history and made Steph promise for the umpteenth time that she’d phone if she needed him.  

“I’ll be okay,” Steph told him calmly. That was a lie, and they both knew it, but Tony didn’t object.

Once he was gone, she shut the door behind him and spent a whole minute studying the home entertainment system and its various remotes before rewinding the tape like Tony had already shown her how to do.

"A Shéamais," she murmured as his face lit up the space in front of her all over again. This time she did press her fingers to the image, and this time she was shuddering with the full force of her grief before he ever said her name. She cried like she hadn’t ever cried, until her chest burned and her limbs felt only partly real, and couldn't even see his face clearly by the time she realised he was still talking.

“I’m gonna ask you to try,” Bucky said again, and Steph glared for all she was worth.

“I won’t,” she told him, very sure. “Stupid boy, of course I won’t.”

It didn’t stop her from watching the whole thing again, and then again, or from taking a bleak kind of comfort in the fact that she could, at least, let his voice fill the gap between her awful, empty present and the future he seemed so sure of.

“You better damn well be there,” she muttered, then reached out and stroked his face apologetically. _Of course_ he would. For all she knew he was there already, railing at Gary or Howard or both about how he’d given everything he had to keep her safe, and had only asked for _one thing_ in return, and here she was, not yet 26 but ready to just lay down and die because he wasn't there to talk her through her every breath.

“Fine,” Stephanie said out loud, talking to the Bucky who might be watching rather than the one whose image shivered and jumped on the newish recording of Howard’s fragile 40-year-old reel. She thought about his face as it would have been if he’d ever come in and found her passed out in their living room with tears on her face and nothing but Tony’s fancy coffee in her cupboards, and shook her head with a kind of desperate fondness. “I’ll try, okay?”

Because he’d asked her, she told herself, and only because he’d asked her. Which, if she knew anything at all about James Barnes, was why the idiot had asked in the first place.

“I love you too, you stupid goddamn punk.”


	4. Saturday afternoon on the Upper East Side

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Steph gets her hair done.

“Are you sure?”

Stephanie was, in point of fact, pretty damn sure. Annette, the stylist Tony’s secretary had recommended, watched her anxiously in the mirror. “People spend days on end in this chair to get halfway to your natural colour.”

Bucky would have adored her just the same if she’d been bald and had a face like a monkey, she knew, but as it was he’d always loved her hair, and Steph had already discovered that she couldn’t even comb it without thinking about his quick fingers, his lips against her neck, that satisfied-wondering murmur: a ghrá geal, my bright love. Meaning her spirit, her James would have cried indignantly if he knew what she was thinking, and certainly not her _hair_ \- but even so Stephanie was increasingly sure that she couldn’t be any kind of bright without him.

“I’m just…ready for a change.”

It would have been more correct to say she recognised that change had happened, whether she was ready for it or not, but there were some things you couldn’t tell someone on first meting. Annette, quite unaware of Steph’s train of thought, smiled sunnily.

“I feel you, sweetheart. Were you thinking of anything in particular?”

She put her hands on Steph’s shoulders and leaned down over her. Like so much about the 1980s, Annette was too loud, and too close, and Steph wanted to scream or throw things or just goddamn go home.

“A light auburn would really bring out your eyes.”

Stephanie shook her head.

“Too Irish,” she murmured; the stylist laughed uncertainly.

“Is that…bad?”

It wasn’t, but in its way that was the problem. 

“Brown,” Steph decided, thinking of the dark head she’d spent most of her life checking on out of the corner of her eye. “This one, maybe.”

It wouldn’t be like his, not really- she wasn’t sure there _was_ a dye that could produce quite that deep chocolate shade. With any luck she’d look like Winifred Barnes, who had done right by her son and goddaughter long after she’d been crippled by the loss of the man she’d loved. The stylist hemmed and hawed- it was too dark, Annette fretted, and would be too severe. It might wash her out, as well, and leave her looking pale and sickly. For the first time in days, Stephanie felt like someone was using adjectives she could almost relate to.

“This one,” she repeated firmly, and since it was her head they were talking about that was the colour that went on. As she waited, Steph wondered if it had been worse for Fred than it would be for her. It was one thing to offer everything you had to a man who had no idea how to love you; it was quite another to have been loved so completely that you had no idea what your chances were of living any length of time without the boy who should be right there with you, all the way.

“God,” she muttered, thoroughly annoyed. Two years on active duty during the Second World War, and now she couldn’t even get her hair done without tearing up. Annette handed her a tissue, patted her shoulder apologetically, and mused aloud that the peroxides were a lot worse, dear, so maybe it was just as well. Steph nodded once, twice, and then picked up a too-loud, too-bright magazine she could hold up in front of her like some kind of conversational shield. When they were finally, finally, done, the stylist whistled through her teeth.

“I’m just gonna say it: I was wrong. This is beautiful, sweetheart.”

It wasn’t, not really. It was exactly like Annette had said- too dark, too severe- she looked like someone else entirely.

“It’s perfect,” Stephanie told her, meaning perfectly appropriate rather than aesthetically ideal. Annette beamed.

“Great! C’mon, let me give you bangs, huh? It’ll perk the whole thing right up.”

Steph was almost completely sure that she wasn’t agreeing to be shot or run over with a vehicle, but she still found herself holding her breath until the stylist came at her with another, smaller, pair of scissors and she understood that “bangs” were what people now called a fringe.

“Oh,” she murmured. “Bangs.”

Annette clearly had no idea what to make of the interjection, but she nodded agreeably. In no time at all they were washing it, then drying it in thick waves unlike anything Steph would have known how to encourage on her own- and then a perfect stranger was watching her uncertainly in the huge mirror in front of them while her stylist beamed proudly over her shoulder.

She didn’t look that much like her Auntí- Steph’s features were sharper, her eyes a darker blue and closer set. On the other hand, she looked nothing at all like Bucky’s own sweet girl. She wondered fleetingly if he would like it, but if he’d been there to like it then he’d have been there to mutter darkly that there was no point spending good money trying to improve on perfection, and she’d have had to stop his muttering by giving him something else to do with his mouth, and then-

“I like it,” Stephanie promised apologetically- it must be very poor form to scowl like that right after so dramatic a transformation. “Thank you- it’s exactly what I was hoping for.”

That, at least, was not a lie.

On a whim, or perhaps because she was already thinking about metamorphosis, Stephanie also stopped at one of the shops that called itself a drugstore even though it sold almost everything else on earth as well. She came away with her lips stained deep red, marked unkissable until such time as she found her way back to her husband who adored her. Peggy Carter would have approved of the colour quite emphatically, Steph decided; the pang of longing for her friend was no less vivid for having been so completely expected. Bucky, of course, would have hated it: it, too, was too severe, and not at all what his own Steph would have gone for at any stage of the life she’d known with him. It was her first independent purchase in this new, too-loud world, and scandalously expensive, but Steph found that she appreciated the reassuring weight of the little tube, cool and hard in the pocket of her coat. It was a guarantee she hadn’t known she needed: the mask she wore was of her choosing, at least, and she was free to re-apply it, on her own terms, as often as it slipped.

It wasn’t much, as freedoms went, but it had to be better than looking in the mirror and seeing only the life she wanted more than anything, and couldn't ever have. 


	5. Moscow, early morning

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> haircut II

“Whoever authorised this should be shot.”

Behind the newly blonde Captain Kolchak, Private Zolnerowich cringed.  

“General Lukin said-”

“I heard what he said.”

His tone was a shade too harsh, considering the unfortunate teenager had had no say in the matter either, but Yasha was sick beyond expression of being treated like a child by all and sundry just because he couldn’t always remember everything his doctors seemed to think he should. “I’d like to know what they were drinking _before_ he said it. People will able to see me coming in pitch darkness.”

Yasha had already been pale even by the dismal standards that applied to recent invalids of Siberian extraction, but the platinum blonde shock that had replaced his dark hair gave his every expression an icy edge that felt entirely foreign.  The murderous look he was still giving his own reflection only made the whole effect more unnerving- especially, it seemed, for the boy still stuttering behind him. 

“Captain, I don’t think-”

Yasha sighed, started to drag his hand backwards through his hair, and stopped to glare again when he realised it was a different sensation entirely with half his hair gone. His jaw was already clenched, but taking his frustration out on Zolnerowich seemed not only needlessly cruel but, frankly, pointless.

“Forget I said anything. Thank you for your help.”

The private, who had obviously been anticipating an unpleasant, ultimately one-sided argument instead of so swift a retraction, stared blankly until Yasha rolled his eyes and waved his hands in an impatient dismissal. “Go on, get out of here. You must have other people to terrorise with those clippers.”

Catching on at last, Zolnerowich threw up a hasty salute and disappeared in a flurry of grateful epithets. Yasha stayed where he was, staring himself down as he lost the battle not to wonder what Anya would have made of the whole affair. More than anything else, he thought his wife would have been indignant that anyone else had dared to touch his hair in the first place- Stefaniya had been barely more than a child when she’d decided that was her job, and even when they were both full-grown it had never occurred to Yasha to question it. Suddenly breathless, he closed his eyes against the too-vivid sensation of her hands in his hair, the treacherous memory of her lips against his neck. Six months, he thought helplessly- six months he’d been without her, and if he just allowed himself the indulgence he could lose himself to her presence as surely as if she were just out of sight instead of lost to him forever.

“Beautiful girl,” he murmured, caught as usual between elegy and invocation. He might have said more, even knowing she had no hope of answering, but the sound of approaching footsteps stilled his tongue. Shaking himself as if he could physically clear his head, Yasha backed away from the mirror and reached for the shirt he’d set aside to save it from Zolnerowich and his peroxide bleach. He was just about presentable by the time the door to his room swung open to reveal Katjana Ionova’s concerned face.

“Is everything all right? You look so _serious_ today.”

Like most of the small army of female attendants with which Lukin seemed determined to his recovering protégé, Katjana was alarmingly young, strikingly beautiful, and not especially subtle about her interest in the vaunted hero whose celebrated past was almost as much of a mystery to himself as to his admirers.

“I’m fine,” Yasha muttered, trying to speak kindly without signaling more interest than he meant to convey. “Thank you, Comrade.”

Normally, that form of address was as effective a dismissal as an outright rejection. Katjana, however, only smiled.  

“Poor Captain,” she breathed, suddenly standing right behind his chair. “You’re so tense.”

The nurse met his eyes in the mirror as her hands found his shoulders, speaking so close to his face that her warm breath made the hairs on his neck rise.

“Are you _sure_ you won’t let me take care of you?” 

_It’s late winter, so cold that Yasha’s been taking extra shifts to afford the fuel it takes to keep their rickety apartment warm enough for Anya’s fragile health._

That’s strange- he has such clear memories of her glowing with health, but somehow here he knows, with grim certainty, that if he doesn’t clock the hours he needs it’ll be his fault when she gets sick again.

_His wife glares at him with the fierce determination she brings to everything she does._

_“There’s no way you’re going anywhere like this.”_

_He needs to go, Yasha reminds her, pushing weakly at his wife’s arm. He’s going to tell her why in detail, but then she presses her palm, blessedly cool, to his cheek._ _“Listen to me. It’s gonna be fine, okay?”_

_Before Yasha can say anything to that, his wife drops her arm- not to let him up, but to climb into bed with him. She wraps herself around him, warm and sweet and so clearly glad to be there that it still makes him wonder, even through worry and nausea and that pounding headache that never completely goes away, how he ever, ever, got so lucky._

_“That’s not fair,” he mutters, rebellious. She smiles._

_“Never said anything about fair, did I?”_

_She lays her head on his chest, and seems to think that means she’s won the argument. Yasha scowls even as he strokes her hair right-handed._

_“Listen, you know I have to-”_

_“Hush.”_

_She doesn’t give much ground, but raises her eyes so she can look at him._ _“We’ll figure it out. Just let_ me _look after_ you _for once, okay?”_

Yasha jerked violently out of the startled nurse’s grasp. Suddenly desperate to put some distance between them, he stood quickly and crossed the room to open the door for her.

“No,” he bit out, struggling to keep his voice steady and his expression calm enough to avoid questions he wasn’t sure he’d be able to answer. “Didn’t I _just_ say I’m fine? Was there anything else?”

He had been hoping to sound brisk, even mildly impatient; instead, the words were sharp enough to take the young woman out of the room with tears already gathering in her eyes.

“Damn,” the captain growled, somehow both remorseful and resentful. This time he did run an agitated hand through his hair, trying not to think too hard about how much apart from his hair had been altered just as completely, and far more permanently.

“Welcome to Moscow,” Yasha muttered. The stranger in the mirror nodded grimly, more resigned than determined. Glancing at the clock, Captain Kolchak allowed himself one last weary sigh before shrugging into his jacket. Where Aleksander had found the uniform Yasha couldn’t say, but everyone seemed to agree that it was his, and therefore appropriate, even if his memories of active service were even more fractured than the odd snatches of a domestic life long lost but still so present occasionally.  

The next time someone knocked on the door, it was to announce that General Lukin had arrived, and would be very pleased to see Captain Kolchak as soon as it was convenient. Yasha offered the somewhat nervous-looking aide a grin that was entirely genuine before hurrying from the room as quickly as he thought his orthopedist would sanction. Aleksander Lukin, he sometimes felt, was the only person with whom he had regular contact in a non-medical capacity, and Yasha looked forward eagerly to their meetings. The timing of the thing was good, too- Lukin always wanted to know about the half-recollections Yasha seemed to stumble into, however trivial they seemed. That, too, seemed very lucky- for a man with no future, who had no clear grasp on his own past, it could only be a source of great comfort to know that there was at least one person in the present on whom it was safe to depend. Welcome to Moscow, indeed.


End file.
